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zawam
Joined: Oct 13, 2005
# Posts: 87
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Posted: 03/17/2007 03:44 am
Hey All...
I am looking for some advice, my question is
: How important is the name of the domain?
vs
: The quality of the content?
The reason i ask this, is i spend most my time thinking of good domain names and never good content that people might actually want to keep coming back for.
So is a great website rubbish with a rubbish/long domain name? or doesnt it really matter?
I am looking to change my approach. I pick the domain and make the content at present. Where as i think it might be better to concentrate on the website and then just choose a domain?
Thoughts welcome...
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excell
Moderator
Joined: Mar 19, 2001
# Posts: 14487
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Posted: 03/17/2007 06:26 am
An easy to remember domain name is good, but it is not the be all and end all. I would rather have a great business name!
The focus of the website, the quality of the content, the uniqueness, detail and expansion of information, the foundational structure - usability / accessibility of the website and underlying code and facilities and how the website relates to other websites are all things to consider.
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georgew
Joined: Apr 26, 2007
# Posts: 7
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Posted: 05/03/2007 07:55 am
As the first commercial web hosting company, I happened to be lucky enough to register a few good domain names.
(why only a few? In those days domains were free, and only one per company was "allowed", and as a responsible person I limited my greed to 3 or 4)(like an idiot, I even unregistered one because it got too many spam complaints, cool.com)
A good domain name, and I mean "oneword.com" names, is worth your weight in gold.
Of course that assumes you have something to sell at all... a name with no product is pretty useless. If you park it on a search site, with no content, it might do ok...
If you have the right domain name, your direct visits will outrun search engine hits by 10 to 1.
In other words, if you have the right domain name, you don't need search engine hits at all. But you still need some content, unless you are just a banner-farmer. But I'm assuming that you actually have something to sell...
As we know, all of the good dot.com names are taken, so unless you can go back to 1993 and register a good name, your only choice is to buy one. And it will be expensive, but probably worth it.
Of course this assumes you have a product people want, and will search for using your domain. That is the key.
On the other hand, SEO is more important that a close-to-good domain. Close only counts in horseshoes and handgranades. So if you sell brass zebras, brasszebra.com is a good name, and brasszebra.net is close, but gets no cigar.
As an example, I have city.com and city.net for my hometown. The city.com domain was getting tons of natural traffic, and the city.net almost zero. The city.com gets 1000 times the traffic of city.net.
But .net is still better than all of the other .xx doimains. That and $5 will buy you a cup of coffee.
So if you find your name with something other than .com, go ahead and register it, but don't expect it to do anything. An almost-good domain name is better than a crappy one, but it won't generate any hits.
So a great .com address is very important, but if you can't pay the price to buy it, search engine optimization is going to be your bread and butter.
If you are trying to make money on the web, without actually running a business and selling a product, then buying a domain will never pay for itself, and you are better off concentrating on good content. Do something like start a book review website, and review books to link-sell through amazon... Something like that. Good content for banner farmers is better than worrying about trying to find a good domain these days.
If you do get lucky and find a way to go back in time, make sure you figure out how to keep the domain registered in your name. Over the last 10 years, most of my domains were stolen dozens of times... The ones we noticed we still have. The ones we were not paying attention to, were lost. We were busy being an ISP, and our accounting department was not keeping track of the domain assets very well, and they didn't notice when we stopped being billed for some of them. So if you find a way to get back there, let me know as I need to ride along with to fix some things myself...
[ Message was edited by: georgew 05/03/2007 08:06 am ]
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yellowwing
Moderator
Joined: May 21, 2002
# Posts: 2523
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Posted: 02/25/2008 09:35 pm
It depends on the competition. If the competition has a superb domain name, you have to convince the buyer and decision makers that your choice would be easier and less expensive to market.
If they can spend less money for the same results they will stop and listen to your proposal.
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Hampstead
Joined: Feb 20, 2001
# Posts: 1877
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Posted: 02/26/2008 12:57 am
Good quality content is the key, but having the keyword(s) in the domain helps too.
There has been conflicting views as to how important keywords are in the URL, but in my experience, URLs with relevant keywords in get a ranking boost on Google. Especially if the keywords are an exact match to the query.
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